beastie wrote:This what droopy thinks quote-mining looks like.
It's really funny to listen to some of you act as if you (or rather, your right-wing media conglomerates)
Fox is not right-wing. It does feature and utilize conservatives and libertarians in its programming much more that any other major mainstream media outlet, but its not conservative per se. Its owned by the Fox media/entertainment empire, which is basically as left-leaning as the rest of the mainstream media and pop entertainment corporate world. It saw a market, many years ago, that needed to be served, and begin doing so. The results are a major success story, especially as viewership of the standard network and cable mainstream media and readership of the major liberal major dailies plummeted over the last couple decades.
What does that leave? Let's see...the Washington Times and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Oh, and AM talk radio, a phenomena that has only existed since the early 90s. Everything else, the major daily newspapers, cable and network news, the morning shows, the news magazines, Hollywood and the arts, the music business, the foundations and academia are yours.
But back to the dispute at hand - let's take William Buckley as an example. He is a good example in many ways. While there is no doubt that the modern republican party has become home to a certain racist portion of the population who once made their homes with Southern Democrats,
You've provided not a shred of evidence thus far that this is a remotely credible assertion. Indeed, as I never get tired of pointing out, and as modern history bears witness, the only true remaining outpost of institutional, intellectual, and political government enforced racism in American society or political life is within the Democratic Party and among the American Left generally. There is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide here. The Left is also the only place where overt, blatant racist actions, statements, writings, and sentiments are not only tolerated, but celebrated and legitimized.
there is a much larger coalition that opposed the civil rights movement for other reasons, but which still translated into being on the wrong end of history, as Buckley himself later admitted.
Nice little dodge here, but I've already ferreted you out here, Beastie. Those misgivings, as the very article you quoted points out, and as I've pointed out time and again, turned out, as time passed, to have been quite prescient and well grounded.
Asked by Time in 2004 whether he regretted any positions he had taken in the past, Buckley said simply, "Yes. I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary."
This is a joke argument, Beastie, coming from a dog and pony philosophy. If Buckley was on the wrong side of history in some sense on this specific issue, it is the height of irony that the Left had become, by the middle of the seventies, the party, first of compensatory racial discrimination ("Affirmative Action") and then of racial balkanization, racial separatism, and ethnic chauvinism (Multiculturalism). In the meantime, it destroyed the inner city black family, substantially slowed black progress into the middle class, utterly destroyed public education among the inner city poor (while reducing it to facile mediocrity across the nation), and generated the entrenched, intergenerational black underclass, a phenomenon that hadn't existed among American blacks prior to the last third of the 20th century.
The problem with Buckley is that he made statements, sometimes at different points in his life, that can be taken to be totally opposed to racism, or tolerant of racism.
That's only a "problem" for a bomb-throwing polemicist. What it shows is that Buckley was a product, to a great degree, as are all of us, of his time, and that he grew (and rapidly) intellectually over time as his thinking and perspectives evolved.
This article does not support your tendentious, dogmatic claims about conservatives and race and in point of fact puts them, for all intents, to the torch while admitting that the past is the past and even some of the best minds of the conservative movement began with views that were embedded in the cultural contexts of their time. It also points out that certain central misgivings entertained by major conservatives (including Goldwater, who no one but an abject lunatic would assert had racist sentiments) were well founded.